I was digging through my basement for my krumkake iron a few days ago. Krumkake, for those of you who are not Norse, is a Scandinavian cookie made with butter, sugar and just enough flour and eggs to keep the batter together. They are made using a cast-iron device that looks like an overly flat waffle iron; mine, like all good krumkake irons, was inherited from my grandmother. And just like my grandmother, I break it out once a year to make cookies for Christmas.
The one really critical step in making krumkake is removing the cookie from the iron. After the batter has turned to a nice pliable golden wafer, the krumkake iron must be opened and the cookie rolled into a cone using a wooden wedge (also inherited from my grandmother). Unfortunately, I have never developed the correct wrist flip for getting the cookie off the iron and around the wooden wedge, and I almost always have to pry the cookie off the iron. The end result is that I usually spend Christmas with multiple third-degree burns on my index finger.
Given my grandmother’s nature, I suppose that damage is strangely appropriate. While she was a loving and caring woman, a decent and honest soul who found her true place in the world when she became a grandmother, she had certain inescapable flaws. The most obvious of these was that she had only the most tenuous grip on reality.
My grandmother was bipolar. Now, it’s not easy living with or loving someone who is mentally ill, and it most certainly tends to leave scars. Fortunately, for most of my childhood the rest of the family shielded the grandchildren from her worst “troubles,” as my grandfather put it. But as I grew older, the manias and problems became more apparent and damaging to all involved.
The low point came when I was in college. After nearly three decades of successful therapy and medication, the drugs stopped working and she wound up in a psychiatric ward. The trauma of it all nearly killed my grandfather, laying him so low in fear that he had lost his wife that he simply stopped functioning. My brother and I had to feed him to keep him alive. Worst of all, my grandmother was so trapped in her own hallucinations that she could not see what was happening to him, to her, or to anyone else in the family.
But that is not how I want to think of her. In my memory she is still the smiling woman who met my brother and me at the bus stop after kindergarten, the playful spirit who liked to eat the bottoms of ice cream cones, my constant companion at Easter services at the local Lutheran church, and the best bacon-cooker on the planet. She is the woman who taught me how to tie my shoelaces backwards and always gave final approval to my prom dates.
She is the patient woman who taught me how to bake, enduring my over-whipped biscuits and under-rolled pie crusts in the name of passing on the family’s traditions and showing her love for her grandson.
Five years have passed since she died, five Christmases when I get out the krumkake iron and make a pastry that is far too fragile for my clumsy hands. But in doing this, I get to remember her at her best. I get to think not of the flaws and the tears and the tragedy that came with her, but of the profound love she showed to those around her. I get to see her when she was consumed not by madness, but by kindness and beauty.
If the price of remembering her at her best is scorching off my fingertips, I’ll take it.
Eric Schuck is an assistant professor of agriculture and resource economics at Colorado State University.
